The Major Project Podcast

Orion Matthews
  • 5.0 (12)
  • Business
  • Biweekly

Every day, somewhere in the world, a billion-dollar project is underway reshaping skylines, powering nations, and pushing the limits of what’s possible. Behind every megaproject are the people who plan, measure, and keep it all on track.  Orion takes us behind the curtain of these mega-projects with interviews of the leaders making it possible and managing billions in scope, risk, and ambition.

  1. Oct 15

    Bonus Episode - Getting In & Growing Up: Career Advice & The Story Behind The Engineerd Life with AJ Waters

    In this extended conversation with AJ Waters, we go beyond the job site and into the question a lot of younger people are asking right now: is construction still a safe bet? AJ makes the case that it absolutely is and that AI isn’t the threat people think it is, as long as you learn to use it. He shares what he wishes he’d known earlier, why construction needs curious techies just as much as it needs engineers, and the advice that anchors his entire outlook: don’t let comparison steal your joy. Orion adds his own story of moving from special education to the honors program and why he believes genius is as common as dirt. The conversation wraps with AJ’s go-to books (Leadership and Self-Deception, Extreme Ownership), the conferences worth your time (Western Winter Workshop, ConExpo), and the origin story of The Engineerd Life - the blog that sat on a shelf for nine months before AJ decided to publish it himself.

  2. Oct 15

    Why Digital Transformation Fails - and How to Fix It | AJ Waters, Procore

    In this episode, Orion sits down with AJ Waters, field COO for public sector at Procore, host of The Engineerd Life podcast, and one of the most widely-traveled and well-connected people in the construction industry. Orion started the Major Project Podcast to bottle the kind of insight you normally only get in the hallway at conferences. AJ has been to hundreds of those conferences and today he opens the whole playbook. About AJ Waters AJ Waters is Field COO for Public Sector at Procore and host of The Engineerd Life podcast. With 20 years in major projects - from estimating at Kiewit to Google data centers to tech leadership at Kahua - AJ has lived on both the construction and technology sides of the industry. He’s one of construction’s most connected voices, known for his 28 Rules for Building Smarter. What You’ll Learn This conversation spans site culture, digital transformation, data strategy, psychological safety, and career building. AJ brings equal parts field credibility and tech fluency, which means the insights here work whether you’re managing an earthworks operation or a platform rollout. 4 Key Takeaways The Same-Hat Test: When you walk a joint venture site and see two different hard hat colors, the project is already in trouble. Psychological unity precedes operational unity, and it starts with something as simple as wearing the same colors. Teams that look like different teams act like different teams. The People-Process-Tech Order: Digital transformations fail because organizations get the sequence wrong. They pick the shiny technology first, then try to force it on the people who have to use it. The framework works — but only when you run it in the right direction: people first, process second, technology last. The Data Wars Are About to Go Hot: Truth on a project is a moving target. Everyone needs access to the same moving target. When they don’t have it, you get rework, conflict, and fragmented realities. AI is about to force this into the open: if your data is messy and siloed when you layer AI on top, you don’t get garbage out - you get confident, beautifully formatted, wrong answers. Garbage in, poisonous sugar cookies out. The Vacation Test: If your team can’t operate without you for a week, you have two problems: broken systems and non-transferable leadership. Both are fixable. But the test only works if you actually take the vacation — and actually stay off your email. Timestamps [00:00:00] AJ’s origin story: Nebraska math kid, aptitude test, and how knowing the right person launched his career at Kiewit [00:07:00] The same-hat test: what tells you a joint venture site is in trouble in under 10 minutes [00:11:00] How getting voluntold to present a talk he’d never rehearsed accidentally launched his tech career [00:16:00] The owner’s dilemma: why “growth solves all ills” breaks down the moment you apply it to digital transformation [00:18:00] Strong Opinions Loosely Held: we didn’t innovate the RFI — we just made the paper form digital [00:25:00] Innovation requires psychological safety to fail — and construction almost never gives people that room [00:31:00] AJ’s biggest estimating failure: missing an entire floor of concrete on a self-perform hotel addition [00:36:00] Why digital transformation fails: people → process → tech, in that order, every time [00:40:00] Truth on a project is a moving target — and everyone needs access to the same moving target [00:44:00] The data wars, AI, and why “garbage in, poisonous sugar cookies out” is the new garbage in, garbage out [00:50:00] The vacation test: what it reveals about your systems and your leadership in one week [00:52:00] Career advice: volunteer for crazy, own your failures, and share what you learned Connect with AJ Waters LinkedIn: AJ Waters https://www.linkedin.com/in/watersaj/  Podcast: The Engineerd Life https://www.theenginerdlife.com/ Resources & Books Mentioned Extreme Ownership — Jocko Willink Leadership and Self-Deception — The Arbinger Institute The Courage to Be Disliked — Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga AJ’s 28 Rules for Building Smarter (blog) Construction Brothers Podcast Conferences: Western Winter Workshop, ConExpo Associations: ASPE, CMAA, AACE, DBIA

  3. Oct 1

    The Report Is Not the Truth: Ahmed Abdelfattah on Dashboards, Risk, and the Illusion of Project Control

    Project control teams are bigger than ever; more schedulers, more risk managers, more reporting managers. And according to Ahmed Abdelfattah, they're delivering worse results than when one planner ran everything with Primavera P3. After nearly 20 years across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Australia, including a 500-person management team at NEOM, Ahmed has a clear diagnosis: the discipline stopped serving the project and started serving itself. Ahmed Abdelfattah has nearly 20 years in project controls across three continents, starting at Arab Contractors Company in Egypt before moving to mega programs in Saudi Arabia with EGIS, AECOM (including NEOM), and Al-Bustan, and now advising engineering and design teams from Adelaide, Australia. He's become a recognized voice on LinkedIn for his visualization work, where his dashboards have attracted calls from VPs, directors, and portfolio managers worldwide.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmed-abdelfattah-3b44399b/   What You'll Learn 1. The Efficiency Inversion Bigger project controls teams are producing worse outcomes. Ahmed watched it happen across continents: where one planner once managed everything and had a direct line to the project manager's decisions, a full department now exists to optimize the project management process itself, not the project. The discipline has become its own industry, competing to perfect its own output rather than achieve completion. 2. Two Reports, Two Purposes Every project generates two fundamentally different types of documents. Systematic records, weekly and monthly reports, exist to satisfy contracts and audits. Nobody reads them for decisions, but they matter. Dynamic reports, executive briefings, scenario reports, focus reports, have no template. They must be built around the person you're presenting to: their time constraints, their background, their priorities, even their insecurities. Most organizations confuse the two and direct their energy accordingly. 3. The Hero Concept Ahmed designs reports the way fast-food chains design roadside billboards. You have five seconds. One hero. One decision. Make the issue the big image, make the decision the price tag, and put everything else in the fine print. The most powerful thing a project controls professional can do - as demonstrated by his SPI 0.65 → 0.8 narrative example - is change the entire framing of a meeting without altering a single fact. 4. Risk Is the Foundation, Not the Footnote A schedule without risk analysis is theater. Ahmed spent 90% of his time on mega projects not planning or scheduling, but running scenarios for decision-makers. His minimum viable project controls setup starts with one thing: a quantitative risk analysis tool, from day zero. His illustration: a 40-story building schedule that confidently set the last activity as "install lighting fixtures on floor 26" - for fixtures not yet selected, let alone manufactured, two years out. Timestamps [00:00:00] Introduction: Nearly 20 years in project controls across three continents [00:03:00] Why project controls became less efficient as teams got bigger [00:06:00] How LinkedIn dashboards led to calls from VPs and portfolio managers [00:11:00] The $2B integrated Oracle/Primavera/Power BI system — that still needed a custom slide [00:21:00] NEOM's 500-person management team and nobody watching the whole project [00:26:00] The one thing to install on day zero: quantitative risk analysis [00:29:00] The 40-story schedule story: how detailed plans create false certainty [00:35:00] Two types of reports: systematic project records vs. dynamic decision reports [00:42:00] The "hero" concept: designing reports like fast-food billboards [00:44:00] How executives establish trust — and why it's about the person, not the dashboard [00:48:00] Entropy and drift: how a 3-day document cycle buries a 2-hour site fix [00:58:00] Minimum viable project controls: 3-month look-ahead, built with the site team [01:04:00] Reframing SPI 0.65 → 0.8 as a winning narrative without changing a single fact

  4. Sep 15

    Bonus Episode: The New Career Moat Is Speed with Hannah Garrett

    In this bonus episode, Hannah Garrett shares practical advice for students, career changers, and professionals hoping to enter the fast-growing data center industry. She explains why emerging leaders should embrace AI, learn by experimenting, and focus on simplifying complex systems. Hannah and Orion also discuss why speed may replace complexity as a competitive advantage, how AI could reshape traditional corporate structures, and why this period of disruption presents an extraordinary opportunity for the next generation of leaders.

  5. Sep 15

    You Can't Automate Chaos - Hannah Garrett on Structure, AI, and the Data Center Boom

    About half of all US data centers scheduled to open this year are delayed or canceled. Hannah Garrett isn't surprised. She's been watching tech and construction try to figure each other out for a decade, and says the real problem isn't energy, equipment, or even AI. It's that nobody fixed their operational structure before the boom hit. Hannah Garrett has 10 years across both sides of data center delivery - five on the GC side at Hensel Phelps and Clark, and five more on the owner side at Meta, Aligned, Microsoft, and Oracle. She's a recognized voice in the industry, known for her LinkedIn post "You Can't Automate Chaos", and for saying out loud what most people in the room are thinking but won't say.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahegarrett/ What You'll Learn 1. The Symptom-Root Cause Gap Delays, burnout, and cost overruns in data center delivery are symptoms - not the disease. Hannah makes the case that most operational pain points trace directly back to systems and structures that were never built for the scale being demanded of them. Until leadership treats the root cause, adding technology only makes the chaos faster. 2. The Amplification Principle AI doesn't fix broken systems. It accelerates them. Hannah's framework: understand your operations end-to-end, map out the full complexity across 40-plus stakeholders, establish structure and only then let AI scale what's already working. Applied too early, it amplifies every gap you haven't dealt with yet. 3. The Simplicity Paradox The smartest people in complex industries tend to build the most complex tools, but complexity degrades data quality, because people stop updating systems they find painful to use. Hannah argues that simpler, centralized platforms (she points to Asana and Monday as examples) produce far better information than the highly engineered tools leadership tends to prefer. 4. The Change Management Translation Problem "Change order" is a career-defining term on a job site. In software, it barely registers. Hannah breaks down the language and cultural gap between tech and construction teams and why the absence of a shared vocabulary means billion-dollar decisions are routinely being made in Slack channels, with no one raising the downstream impacts until it's too late. Timestamps [00:00:00] Introduction: Hannah's 10 years spanning GC and owner sides of data centers [00:02:00] What the boom felt like: "a meteor overnight" — and why the industry wasn't ready [00:04:00] What five years on the GC side taught her about change management [00:06:00] Tech vs. Construction: two different organisms forced to work together [00:09:00] Why projects are delayed: the leadership-to-delivery disconnect [00:15:00] Ford's automation lesson: why structure has to come before AI [00:20:00] PM as "the domino for AI": challenging Jack Dorsey's hierarchy quote [00:22:00] "Chaos is a report card": what happens when you scale without systems [00:29:00] The burned-out PM problem and the doctor/EHR parallel [00:33:00] Dashboard overload: why qualitative metrics often beat KPI tracking [00:37:00] How Hannah takes over a portfolio: her framework for finding the gaps [00:43:00] The case for a central source of truth (and why no one has built it yet) [00:49:00] Final challenge to leadership: bold plans must look nothing like the last 10 years Episode Resources Connect with Hannah Garrett on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahegarrett/  Referenced: Ford's quality automation and rehiring case Referenced: Jack Dorsey — "Hierarchy is an obsolete information routing protocol" If this conversation hit close to home, subscribe to the Major Project Podcast wherever you listen — and leave a review. Every rating helps more project leaders find conversations like this one.

  6. Sep 1

    Bonus Episode: The Curious Engineer: Bruno Caldas on Career Moves, Data, and Getting Into the Room

    Bruno Caldas didn't take a traditional path into the world of billion-dollar projects - he started building computers at 14, earned a mechatronics engineering degree, and landed on a $20 billion iron ore project in the jungles of Guinea within two years of graduating. In this bonus segment, Bruno shares what he'd tell his younger self: get comfortable with discomfort, learn the tools that nobody else wants to learn, and never underestimate the power of a clean dataset. Whether you're a student considering project controls or an early-career professional wondering how to stand out, Bruno's story is proof that the combination of technical curiosity and hands-on hustle is still the fastest path to the rooms where the biggest decisions get made.

  7. Sep 1

    Your AI Strategy IS Your Data Strategy - Bruno Caldas on Building the Intelligent PMO

    Bruno Caldas has built dashboards on a laptop in the African jungle, trained 300 people on SAP, and is now building AI agent teams for one of the world's largest mining companies. The throughline across 18 years in the industry is always the same: the data foundation comes first. Bruno Caldas is a project controls and business intelligence professional at Rio Tinto, sitting at the intersection of capital projects, finance, systems, and AI. With 16 years in mining across Guinea, Brazil, and Canada - and roles spanning site engineering, FP&A, and PMO leadership at Vale and Rio Tinto - he has built the reporting infrastructure behind some of the industry's most complex billion-dollar portfolios. He also teaches business intelligence in Northwestern University's MBA program. Bruno Caldas is a project controls and business intelligence professional at Rio Tinto with 18 years of experience, 16 in mining. Having built PMOs for iron ore, copper, and nickel portfolios at Vale and Rio Tinto - across Africa, Brazil, and Canada - he now sits at the frontier of AI-driven portfolio management. He teaches BI in Northwestern University's MBA program. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunodcaldas/ What You'll Learn 1. Start with your most mature data source - and earn every layer from there Every PMO Bruno built began the same way: find the data that's already clean (usually SAP), build dashboards people actually want to see, and use that success to earn sponsors for the next layer. He didn't start with governance frameworks or org design. He started with what worked and let the wins spread organically. His rule: prove value with what's mature, then go to the piece that needs fixing. Bottom-up, always - even when top-down funding is available. 2. Two reports, not one: the 3-page executive version changes everything On every major project Bruno worked, there were two deliverables: a 200-page full report and a 3-page visual executive summary. Leadership wanted fast, clear, and visual. That discipline - ruthlessly separating what the full team needs from what the boardroom needs - built trust with executives faster than any comprehensive report would have. The 3-page version was how Bruno got sponsors. The 200-page version was how the project stayed on track. 3. Mining operations are five years ahead of corporate on AI - and the math explains why In iron ore, cutting unit cost by just $1 generates $400 million in EBITDA. That return on technology is why operations have been running AI teams, autonomous trucks, and sensor-driven predictive maintenance for years. The S11D project Bruno worked on is entirely truckless - conveyor belts run directly from the pit to the processing plant, no diesel, no CO2. Corporate PMOs are a year or two behind. The gap is real, and closing it is where the opportunity sits. 4. AI agents are only as useful as the data beneath them Bruno is building a team of AI agents - one for risk, one for HSE, one for community relations - on a medallion architecture: raw data piped into a processed layer for agents, then a gold layer for Power BI dashboards. The Microsoft CEO said it plainly: your AI strategy and your data strategy are the same strategy. Bruno's been living that for a decade. His corporate training program teaches everyone up to the markdown level. The agent-building stays with the people who want to go further. Episode Timestamps 00:00 — Introduction 02:00 — Building computers at 14 to mechatronics engineering: Bruno's tech-first origin story 08:00 — The Simandou Project, Guinea: $20B iron ore, a railroad through 50% of a country 15:00 — S11D, North Brazil: drone photography, walking 1,500km of railroad, performance at scale 19:00 — FP&A at Vale: seeing billion-dollar projects through the finance lens 26:00 — Power BI, SAP, and the CFO meeting that moved Bruno to Canada 35:00 — Building a PMO from scratch: start with what's mature, earn sponsors, scale up 44:00 — Operations vs. corporate: why mining AI is years ahead - and the truckless mine 55:00 — AI agents, medallion architecture, and the one-stop-shop PMO control tower 1:00:00 — Teaching AI inside the company: level 1 chatbots to level 8 VS Code 1:10:00 — What PMO teams look like in five years - and why data is the only moat Resources Mentioned Primavera P6 / MS Project (scheduling tools) Power BI - Microsoft (launched 2017) SAP (PS, FM, MM modules) S11D - Vale truckless iron ore mine, North Brazil Simandou Project - Guinea, West Africa Medallion architecture (data engineering framework) Northwestern University MBA program (Bruno teaches BI)

  8. Aug 19

    Bonus Episode: ”Being Right Isn’t Enough” - Omer Iqbal on What Actually Advances a Career in Major Projects

    Omer Iqbal returns for a bonus episode focused on career advice for project controls professionals - from how to actually get noticed in an organization, to why doing everything by the book might be holding you back. He shares his go-to books, the two habits he says can transform any career, and why staying curious is more than just good advice. If you're early in your career or feeling stuck, this one's for you.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
12 Ratings

About

Every day, somewhere in the world, a billion-dollar project is underway reshaping skylines, powering nations, and pushing the limits of what’s possible. Behind every megaproject are the people who plan, measure, and keep it all on track.  Orion takes us behind the curtain of these mega-projects with interviews of the leaders making it possible and managing billions in scope, risk, and ambition.

Information

  • Creator
    Orion Matthews
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Major Project Podcast

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